Pat was an androgynous

Androgyny

Androgyny is a term derived from the Greek words ανήρ, stem ανδρ- and γυνή , referring to the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics...

 fictional character

Fictional character

A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...

 created and performed by Julia Sweeney

Julia Sweeney

Julia Anne Sweeney is an American actress, comedian and author best known as a cast member on Saturday Night Live and for her autobiographical solo shows.-Personal life:...

 for the American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 sketch comedy

Sketch comedy

A sketch comedy consists of a series of short comedy scenes or vignettes, called "sketches," commonly between one and ten minutes long. Such sketches are performed by a group of comic actors or comedians, either on stage or through an audio and/or visual medium such as broadcasting...

 show Saturday Night Live

Saturday Night Live

Saturday Night Live is a live American late-night television sketch comedy and variety show developed by Lorne Michaels and Dick Ebersol. The show premiered on NBC on October 11, 1975, under the original title of NBC's Saturday Night.The show's sketches often parody contemporary American culture...

, and later featured in the film It's Pat

It's Pat

It's Pat, also known as It's Pat: The Movie, is a 1994 comedy film directed by Adam Bernstein and starring Julia Sweeney, Dave Foley, Charles Rocket, and Kathy Griffin...

. The central aspect of sketches featuring Pat was the inability of others to determine the character's gender

Gender

Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...

.

History

Pat (whose full name was revealed on an episode of Saturday Night Live as Pat O'Neil Riley) was a somewhat overweight character with short, curly black hair who wore glasses and a blue western-style shirt with tan slacks. The character spoke in a nasal

Nasalization

In phonetics, nasalization is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth...

 voice that sometimes squeaked. Pat apparently suffered from very sweaty palms, and constantly wiped them on their clothing while making a strange whimpering sound, further adding to the character's unappealing quality. Sweeney wore no face makeup, but colored her lips beige

Beige

Beige may be described as an off tan color or an extremely pale brown color.The term originates from beige cloth, a cotton fabric left undyed in its natural color...

 and overdid her eyebrows to hide any sex identity clues. Sweeney has said that Pat originated when she tried to play a male character in a sketch, but looked unconvincing.

The sketches always involved the celebrity guest hosts of the show playing everyday people who encounter Pat and then go to great lengths to discover Pat's true gender without being so rude as to actually ask (since Pat can be short for either "Patrick", a male name, or "Patricia

Patricia (disambiguation)

Patricia is a common given name. It may also refer to:* Patricia , a song written by Benny Davis, recorded by Perry Como* Princess Patricia of Connaught, a member of the British Royal Family and granddaughter of Queen Victoria...

", a female one). Pat remained completely oblivious, endlessly frustrating the questioners with answers that leave the character's sex vague. The character often made statements that seemed to reveal a sex, only to then immediately confuse things again. (A typical example might be, "Sorry if I'm a little grumpy, I have really bad cramps

Menstruation

Menstruation is the shedding of the uterine lining . It occurs on a regular basis in sexually reproductive-age females of certain mammal species. This article focuses on human menstruation.-Overview:...

... I rode my bike over here, and my calf muscles are KILLING me!") In another sketch, Pat tells Kevin Nealon

Kevin Nealon

Kevin Nealon is an American actor and comedian, best known as a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1986 to 1995, acting in several of the Happy Madison films, for playing Doug Wilson on the Showtime series Weeds, and providing the voice of the title character, Glenn Martin on Glenn Martin,...

 that their name is Pat Riley, same as the coach of the Lakers

Los Angeles Lakers

The Los Angeles Lakers are an American professional basketball team based in Los Angeles, California. They play in the Pacific Division of the Western Conference in the National Basketball Association...

, "except there's a big difference between him and me. I'm not the coach of a professional basketball team." Other gags included Pat's attempts at humor, which served to confuse everyone further, such as when asked what Pat is short for, the character would reply, Pat is short for "P-a-a-a-a-a-t!", or when asked in an application for sex, Pat responded "Please!". Another joke was when Pat was asked the full name, to which the character responded that Pat almost never referred to the character's self by the middle name, as it was embarrassing, to which an eager audience was filled in that it was "O'Neill", again continuing the joke. In yet another sketch where Pat goes to the hairdresser, the stylist asks which magazine Pat would like to read, naming gender-specific titles. However, Pat asks for People

People (magazine)

In 1998, the magazine introduced a version targeted at teens called Teen People. However, on July 27, 2006, the company announced it would shut down publication of Teen People immediately. The last issue to be released was scheduled for September 2006. Subscribers to this magazine received...

.

The character was popular enough to spawn a feature length 1994 film called It's Pat

It's Pat

It's Pat, also known as It's Pat: The Movie, is a 1994 comedy film directed by Adam Bernstein and starring Julia Sweeney, Dave Foley, Charles Rocket, and Kathy Griffin...

(from the lyrics of the character's theme song on Saturday Night Live). In the film, Pat meets Chris, another sexually ambiguous character played by Dave Foley

Dave Foley

David Scott "Dave" Foley is a Canadian comedian, writer, director, and producer best known for his work in The Kids in the Hall, NewsRadio, A Bug's Life, and Celebrity Poker Showdown...

. (On SNL, Chris had been played by Dana Carvey

Dana Carvey

Dana Thomas Carvey is an American actor and stand-up comedian, best known for his work as a cast member on Saturday Night Live and for playing the role of Garth in the Wayne's World movies.-Early life:...

.) They quickly fall in love and propose to each other at exactly the same time. Before the wedding, however, Chris breaks up with Pat on account of Pat's arrogance and the fact that Pat cannot decide on a direction in life. Meanwhile, Pat has become an object of obsession of a neighbor (Charles Rocket

Charles Rocket

Charles Rocket was an American film and television actor, notable for his tenure as a cast member on Saturday Night Live as well as for his appearances as the villain Nicholas Andre in the film Dumb and Dumber; as Dave Dennison, the father in Disney's Hocus Pocus.-Early life and career:Rocket was...

), who is so determined to discover Pat's sex that he goes insane. Pat also has a brief rock music

Rock music

Rock music is a genre of popular music that developed during and after the 1960s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States. It has its roots in 1940s and 1950s rock and roll, itself heavily influenced by rhythm and blues and country music...

 career in the film and plays with the band Ween

Ween

Ween is an American alternative rock group. They formed in 1984 in New Hope, Pennsylvania when central members Aaron Freeman and Mickey Melchiondo met in an eighth grade typing class. Ween has a large cult underground fanbase despite being generally unknown in American pop music...

. After the band hired Pat for a cameo appearance, he/she built it up and started looking at it from an unrealistic point of view (in which Pat thought he/she was going to become an overnight celebrity), which had a hand in the breaking up of Pat and Chris. The film was a critical

Film criticism

Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films, individually and collectively. In general, this can be divided into journalistic criticism that appears regularly in newspapers, and other popular, mass-media outlets and academic criticism by film scholars that is informed by film theory and...

 and commercial bomb

Box office bomb

The phrase box office bomb refers to a film for which the production and marketing costs greatly exceeded the revenue regained by the movie studio. This should not be confused with Hollywood accounting when official figures show large losses, yet the movie is a financial success.A film's financial...

.

Sweeney also helped co-author a book to coincide with the film's release, entitled "It's Pat!: My Life Exposed". Pat makes it through the entire 96 page book without revealing his/her true sex.

Pat's gender

Sweeney admitted that Pat is probably a woman. This admission stems from a sketch with Harvey Keitel

Harvey Keitel

Harvey Keitel is an American actor. Some of his most notable starring roles were in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, Ridley Scott's The Duellists and Thelma and Louise, Ettore Scola's That Night in Varennes, Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Jane Campion's The...

 in which their two characters, both of dubious sexual provenance

Provenance

Provenance, from the French provenir, "to come from", refers to the chronology of the ownership or location of an historical object. The term was originally mostly used for works of art, but is now used in similar senses in a wide range of fields, including science and computing...

, share a kiss. Sweeney reflexively tilted her head to receive the kiss in the stereotypically feminine fashion, a move that was not noticed at the time but was brought to her attention a couple of years later. Sweeney says she normally paid close attention to such details in her performances as Pat and was disappointed that she had made this mistake. Although a slip of acting does not necessarily define Pat's sex, Sweeney nevertheless accepted that she has defined Pat as a woman.

In the SNL episode starring Linda Hamilton

Linda Hamilton

Linda Carroll Hamilton is an American actress best known for her portrayal of Sarah Connor in The Terminator and its sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Catherine Chandler in the television series Beauty and the Beast, for which she was nominated for two Golden Globes and an Emmy...

, 16 November 1991, a few people are able to learn the truth about Pat's sex. In a sketch set at a gym

Gym

The word γυμνάσιον was used in Ancient Greece, that mean a locality for both physical and intellectual education of young men...

nasium, the showers there are separated by sex, forcing Pat to choose one or the other; when Pat does, Hamilton and the other characters in the sketch learn Pat's sex. However, the audience is still left wondering, because while the characters in the sketch were learning the truth, SNL cut to Kevin Nealon, from the Weekend Update

Weekend Update

Weekend Update is a Saturday Night Live sketch that comments on and parodies current events. It is the show's longest running recurring sketch, having been on since the show's first broadcast, and is typically presented in the middle of the show immediately after the first musical performance...

desk, for a Special Report announcing that families with small children get 5 times as many colds as single adults. In the final Pat sketch to air on television, Keitel asks Pat directly what Pat's sex is. Just as Pat is about to reveal the truth, an audience member (played by Adam Sandler

Adam Sandler

Adam Richard Sandler is an American actor, comedian, screenwriter, musician, and film producer.After becoming a Saturday Night Live cast member, Sandler went on to star in several Hollywood feature films that grossed over $100 million at the box office...

) suddenly stands up and screams at Pat not to tell, declaring that NBC

NBC

The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...

 will be bereft of comedy if Pat told, along with the departure of Cheers

Cheers

Cheers is an American situation comedy television series that ran for 11 seasons from 1982 to 1993. It was produced by Charles/Burrows/Charles Productions, in association with Paramount Network Television for NBC, and was created by the team of James Burrows, Glen Charles, and Les Charles...

and David Letterman

David Letterman

David Michael Letterman is an American television host and comedian. He hosts the late night television talk show, Late Show with David Letterman, broadcast on CBS. Letterman has been a fixture on late night television since the 1982 debut of Late Night with David Letterman on NBC...

. Pat reluctantly agrees to this, and the question goes unanswered. The sketch was parodied on the animated show The Critic

The Critic

The Critic is an American prime time animated series revolving around the life of film critic Jay Sherman, voiced by actor Jon Lovitz. It was created by Al Jean and Mike Reiss, both of whom had worked as writers on The Simpsons. The Critic had 23 episodes produced, first broadcast on ABC in 1994,...

when the main character watches "Yesterday Night Live" and the Australian host comes out and says "She's a girl mate, I saw her backstage" and pulls her wig off with her saying "You ruined my career!"